Experiment with Code Spaces and related tooling

[awwaiid]

We try to make it as easy as possible to contribute to the project. One of the current tools to explore are Github codespaces, along with docker/docker-compose to make this easy. This ticket is to track research and experimentation around this.

[github-actions]

This issue is marked as stale due to no activity within 30 days. If no further activity is detected within 7 days, it will be unassigned.

[github-actions]

Automatically unassigned after 7 days of inactivity.

[aeisenberg]

Hi, I have some experience with codespaces. I would like to contribute a devcontainer that will help new users get started.

[dorner]

@aeisenberg give it a shot!

[aeisenberg]

Thanks. I'm giving it a shot and I have something that I think works. With my change, you can create a codespace and after initialization completes, you have the correct ruby version installed, postgres available, and rails setup. All you need to do is call bin/start.

The downside is that there are no pre-built docker images for Ruby 3.2.2 right now since the latest is 3.2.3. This means that before the container can be initialized, we must download and compile 3.2.2. This takes a while. I'll put up what I have after I clean it up a bit, but I'd like some guidance on how to make this better.

[aeisenberg]

I spoke too soon (or typed too soon). I found an image that provides 3.2.2 by default. This significantly speeds up the codespace startup. However, when you move to a new version of ruby, we'll need to update the image as well. I'll put that in the README.

[aeisenberg]

PR created. I hope this will be useful for you. I wanted to work on this because when I tried to set up the project myself, I had trouble getting the dev environment correct. With this change, it should be one-click to get a working environment (though it will take a little time).

When the ruby version changes, it would be nice (but not necessary) to also update the docker image.

[github-actions]

Automatically unassigned after 7 days of inactivity.

[aeisenberg]

I'm still working on this and getting feedback on #4292. Can someone reassign me?

[github-actions]

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[aeisenberg]

Still working on this. 😄 Can you reassign?

[cielf]

Done.

[github-actions]

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[aeisenberg]

Will be fixed by #4353

[lsfernandes92]

Hello there! It's great to see the improvements in action. I managed to run the project within the codespace environment. Kudos to @aeisenberg and @awwaiid for the accessibility enhancements! 👏

I'm here because last week (before those codespace changes), I was going through the documentation and trying to set up the project locally to contribute. At that time, the only method I found was to manually install Ruby and Postgres, along with all the required libraries, Bundler, rbenv/rvm, XCode's command line tools, homebrew, etc...

However, I managed to containerize the project to run with Docker Compose. This provides another convenient way to contribute, as it allows setting up and running the application without any environment configuration. The only requirements are Docker and Docker Compose installed on your machine.

That being said, do you still think it's worth Dockerizing the project? If that's the case, can I work on it?

[dorner]

Heh... this is a perennial request. We've had it before and actually removed it.

For some more history and context, see #3781 (comment) and more importantly #1856 (comment) .

@awwaiid is this issue OK to close since we merged the codespaces stuff?